Humanities Division
PhD Student
Graduate
History Of Consciousness
I grew up outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. I hold an undergraduate degree in anthropology and environmental studies (St. Olaf College, 2010) and a master’s degree in science, technology, and society (University College London, 2016). For many years I've worked outside of academia: producing science documentary TV programs for the BBC and PBS/WGBH, teaching English in Spain, studying climate science in arctic Siberia, and building cabinets in a carpentry shop. Out of this variegated blend of experiences, I’ve developed an intellectual practice that includes both traditional scholarship and generative art, including photography, printmaking, book arts, and sculpture.
I am an artist and scholar interested in documentary and its relation to knowledge, communication, and the histories of art, science, and technology. Critical of contemporary forms of financial capitalism and neoliberal rationality, I approach this topic with the conviction that we are more than entrepreneurial subjects, and our earthly relations matter, hence my engagement with literatures of STS, human geography, cultural and media studies, sociology, anthropology, as well as its overlap with the history of science and technology.
I'm interested in the relationship between knowledge and communication—whether on TV, in medical diagnostic manuals, or through embodied material practices in and beyond what is conventionally understood as science and art. Experimental and speculative practices hold my attention lately as forms of self-reflexivity that navigate the many competing priorities of our world, such as individual and collective wellbeing, universal and particular forms of knowledge, etc. One case study I consider promising is documentary photography and the artist photobook monograph, a genre of creative and communicative practice that resonates with work in the humanities relating to alternative theorizations of history, time, speculative temporalities, and cultural narrative.
Isaac Julien Moving Image Lab Curatorial and Research Fellowhip (Fall 2025)
Dean’s Commendation, University College London, 2016
First-Place Dissertation Prize, MSc in Science, Technology, and Society, University College London, 2016
Top-of-Class Prize, University College London, MSc in Science, Technology, and Society, 2016
"Performing ‘the authoritative account’: How the BBC’s Horizon produces epistemic authority." Social Studies of Science. Volume 51, Issue 3, 2020.